Who Are The All-Time Heroes of i-Technology?

I wonder how many people, as I did, found themselves thrown into confusion by the death last week of Jean Ichbiah (pictured), inventor of Ada.

Learning that the inventor of a computer programming language is already old enough to have lived 66 years (Ichbiah was 66 when he succumbed to brain cancer) is a little like learning that your 11-year-old daughter has grown up and left home or that the first car you ever bought no longer is legal because it runs on gasoline in an age where all automobiles must run on water. How can something as novel, as new, as a computing language possibly already be so old-fangled that an early practitioner like Ichbiah can already no longer be with us?

The thought was so disquieting that it took me immediately back to the last time I wrote about Ichbiah, and indeed about Ada Lovelace for whom his language was named. It was in the context of my quest a couple of years ago to identify the Top Twenty Software People in the World.

It began as an innocent enough exercise, inadvertently kick-started by Tim Bray writing in his popular "Ongoing" blog about how he rated Google's Adam Bosworth as "probably one of the top 20 software people in the world." Already famous for Quattro Pro, Microsoft Access, and Internet Explorer 4 even before he joined BEA as VP of engineering in 2001, when BEA bought Crossgain, the company he'd by then cofounded after leaving Microsoft, Bosworth went on to become BEA's chief architect before leaving to join Google. Definitely a shoo-in for the Top Twenty then. But the question naturally arose - or at least it did in my mind - who are the other 19?

But what about those who came before, the precursors of the current crop of talent? I wrote at the time:

"Can a list of the Top 20 i-Technologists possibly be compiled that doesn't cause the online equivalent of fistfights when published? Obviously not. But that shouldn't deter us from trying."

My inbox soon began to fill up with a deluge of nominations, and within days I was able to list forty mind-bogglingly gifted candidates, as follows (click on the name for a brief description of the individual concerned):

Tim Berners-Lee: "Father of the World Wide Web" and expectant father of the Semantic Web

Joshua Bloch: Formerly at Sun, where he helped architect Java's core platform; now at Google

Grady Booch: One of the original developers of the Unified Modeling Language

Adam Bosworth: Famous for Quattro Pro, Microsoft Access, and IE4; then BEA, now Google

It was at this point that the name of The Father of Ada was thrown into the hopper, along with that of Ada Lovelace herself. How could I possibly not have already included Jean Ichbiah, many wrote to say? Indeed the one new submission was more indignant than the next, and I soon expanded the list of candidates from forty to one hundred, by adding the following sixty:

Gene Amdahl: Implementer in the 60s of a milestone in computer technology: the concept of compatibility between systems

Marc Andreessen: Pioneer of Mosaic, the first browser to navigate the WWW; co-founder of Netscape

Charles Babbage: Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1828; inventor of the 'calculating machine'

Now we all know that there are others, that this list of 100 candidates barely scratches the surface, so....have at it: who's been left out? Once I have compiled a definitive list of, say, 150, I will devise a means by which we can vote and decide once and for all which 99 should join Adam Bosworth (who, for the record, loathes the whole idea of any such exercise, as does Tim Bray - who calls such popularity contests "moronic"; both would I am quite certain wish me to record here that this entire exercise owes nothing to their actual input, only to Tim's blogged remark en passant all those years ago...)

Jeremy Geelan is Chairman & CEO of the 21st Century Internet Group, Inc. and an Executive Academy Member of the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences. Formerly he was President & COO at Cloud Expo, Inc. and Conference Chair of the worldwide Cloud Expo series. He appears regularly at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences across six continents. You can follow him on twitter: @jg21.

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